How do other writing systems represent particular phonemes?
This is not an easy task because the phoneme boundaries are not equivalent across languages. What this table illustrates is that while any language can be written in any orthography, there will be certain phonemes that cannot be expressed adequately because the orthography has no conventional way of indexing or coding the sound. Germanic languages start out trying to represent 20 vowels with only the four letters inherited from Latin. Perhaps only 12-15 are pure unblended sounds. It still means that digraphs and diacritics will be necessary if there is to be one and only one phoneme corresponding to each grapheme. There are gaps and mistakes in this table because its author is no expert on Germanic languages. Choosing good key words is a major problem. Over time, however, this work in progress should get closer to the correct representation. Please notify me of any errors. sbett@mailcity.
